Facebook Connect only for user profile link

Question

So i have input field where user can copy there facebook profile

example

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=SOMEID or http://www.facebook.com/SOMENAME

but some people dont copy and paste the url, they just type there name like Josh Wright even though there are many Josh Wright !! and also the link it isn't correct http://www.mySite/Josh Wright :D. And for that reason i want to have a button for connection,after the app show and they log in i want to show there profile link.I noticed that youtube does that.

Note: I dont want to use Facebook Connect to allow them to register or login to the system. Just to get their profile link.

Answer 1

There are severeal solutions to this problem.

The first is you put a label next to the textbox saying 'https://www.facebook.com/' and then a textbox. This will indicate to users to only enter their facebook username and hopefully get rid of some spam data. This is the easiest solution but not very accurate.

The second solution is using a regular expression. This will help you restrict the field to https://www.facebook.com/USERNAME. This is the next easiest solution and it would be hard for someone to fake it, unless they enter a fake username.

The last solution is don't be afraid of Facebook Connect! I whole heartedly agree in not using the official sdk (I personally don't as it is too heavy on resources). But if you read and then understand the documentation, you can make some lightweight code that will let a user connect to your application for it to pull the username. Connecting to your application doesn't neccesarily mean the user has to be able to login with Facebook. This last solution is probably the hardest to implement, but will look the best and be the most reliable.

Sorry if some of this doesn't make sense. It is really early haha.